Positive thinking by itself is of little use says L. Michael Hall. So what is real self-confidence?

Everybody seems to want to feel self-confident, but that may not be as desirable as first thought. If you feel self-confident when you do not have the skills to back it up, that kind of confidence may be more arrogant - and even foolish - than confident.

"We learn best by accepting our 'not knowing', then developing our skills, rather than feeling good. That's self-confidence"

As a word, confidence is an interesting one. It is made up of 'to have faith' (fideo) and 'with' (con) oneself. When you know you are able to DO something, then you can confidently say, "I can do that." Confidence is about doing something. Confidence also means believing in what you can do. If you can do something, if you have skills and abilities in something and don't acknowledge them, your confidence in yourself regarding them will be low. But if you feel confident in yourself and you do not have the skills, if you are not competent to do something well, your confidence is shallow, hollow, and mere persona without reality. That will convince no one. That will not win friends and influence people. Merely developing a state of confidence for something you are not skilled or competent in, may make you feel good (like a mental drug), but it will typically not help you in learning the skill. When learning a new skill, we all have to go through the stage of knowing we are not (yet) much good at something. We learn best by accepting and tolerating our 'not knowing', then focusing on the skill development, rather than our feeling. That's self-confidence. It's about doing things.

Self-esteem

Self-esteem is an entirely different creature. It's about being who we are. It's about your value, dignity, worth, and esteem as a human being. It's unconditional, and does not depend on your skills or performance. At least, I hope that your self-esteem is unconditional. It should NOT be based on what you can do or perform (self-confidence). It should be based on the fact that you are a human being with value.

Self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is quite different from self-confidence. Self-efficacy goes beyond self-confidence and esteem, to speak about your trust in yourself and in your innate human powers of thinking, feeling, speaking, behaving, learning and relating. It describes an inner map wherein you believe that you can work things out and cope with the challenges of life, if not master them completely.

Self-efficacy can occur when you may not have a particular skill or knowledge, yet you believe that you can learn it. You know you have the ability to take on a new challenge, take risks and learn things, and so you apply yourself to learning something. Self-efficacy speaks more about the future whereas self-confidence speaks about the past. Self-confidence describes what you have faith in yourself right now to do. Self-efficacy speaks about your sense of inner power (efficacy) to make things happen in the future.

L. Michael Hall, PhD, is an independent US trainer and researcher who specialises in NLP. In 1996, Michael co-founded with Dr. Bob Bodenhamer Neuro-Semantics® as a field of study and as an international society. www.neurosemantics.com

From the Winter 2004 edition of Speaking Out